‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ features Comic-Con’s nuttiest foreigners yet

SAN DIEGO Seeing new and original things at Comic-Con are growing increasingly rare. With Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Luc Besson’s sprawling sci-fi passion project that’s precisely a year from release it’s all new.

And it seems interesting, expensive and perhaps spectacular.

Set deep into the 2300 s, Valerian is a weird, alien-infested space epic based on Valrian and Laureline, a French comic book series created in 1967 that follows a pair of government special spies in space. Most of the film takes place on Alpha, a clustered community of thousands of species living in relative harmony.

Aside from a teaser and a few photos , no one has seen what The Fifth Element and Lucy director has been at work on as of late. After some introductions including concept art from Alpha the moment Hall H was waiting for arrived: the first extensive footage anyone has seen from Besson’s big-budget gamble.

Despite that shooting wrap just five weeks ago, with months of postproduction work to go, they unspooled seven minutes.